Is Your Car Insurance More Expensive?

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For me, yes.

I found the above on my insurance company’s policy portal. I totally get the first two items but the third reason caught me off guard. I really shouldn’t be surprised since a lot of people forgot how to drive coming out of the Pandemic. Recently over a two day span I encountered three idiots in less than 45 minutes of drive time.

  • In the parking lot of the grocery store a guy pulls out of his spot and starts driving directly towards me. We were both going slow so the head on wouldn’t have been too catastrophic. I braked and stopped. He kept driving straight at me. Was he having a medical issue, a seizure perhaps? This driver then slowly does a very wide U-turn, crosses the parking spaces and starts to head off. SMH.
  • On the way home (SAME DAY) a different idiot decides to make a left turn from the far right lane and cuts me off. SMH x2. On this day I was averaging one idiot every 15 minutes.
  • Last but not least another idiot darted out of a cross street, cuts me off and starts speeding away.

So if you want to know why your car insurance premiums are higher it’s because of the idiots. Pretty soon, premiums will go up again because of the robots.

A woman was found trapped under a driverless car. It’s not what it looks like, the car company said — https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/03/tech/driverless-car-pedestrian-injury/index.html

Thank you all for letting me vent.

I’m not leaving the house today.

Scary Charts – 10.01.23 (mortality gap in US Adults With and Without a College Degree)

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CITATION

Case, Anne and Angus Deaton. 2023. “Accounting for the widening mortality gap between American adults with and without a BA.” BPEA Conference Draft, Fall. — https://www.brookings.edu/articles/accounting-for-the-widening-mortality-gap-between-american-adults-with-and-without-a-ba/

LADA All-Cause Mortality

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CONCLUSIONS

Despite having fewer metabolic risk factors than type 2 diabetes, LADA has equal to higher risks of death, CVD, and retinopathy. Poorer glycemic control, particularly in LADAhigh, highlights the need for improved LADA management.

All-Cause Mortality and Cardiovascular and Microvascular Diseases in Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults — Diabetes Care 2023;46(10):1857–1865 — https://doi.org/10.2337/dc23-0739

Brugada Syndrome

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A 36-year-old female presents to the ED after experiencing an episode of sudden syncope. The patient has no significant past medical history, and reports that she was walking to the end of her driveway to retrieve her mail when she suddenly collapsed to the ground. She recalls waking up on her driveway with concerned neighbors gathered around her…

http://www.emdocs.net/em3am-brugada-syndrome/

Dear Readers – another Saturday morning and this Grandpa Underwriter is back to his old tricks of reading about things that are WAY ABOVE his pay grade. There are two clinical scenarios in the article. Enjoy!

Sedentary Behavior and Incident Dementia Among Older Adults

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Conclusions and Relevance  Among older adults, more time spent in sedentary behaviors was significantly associated with higher incidence of all-cause dementia. Future research is needed to determine whether the association between sedentary behavior and risk of dementia is causal.

Sedentary Behavior and Incident Dementia Among Older Adults — https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2809418

I’m screwed.

More Random Thoughts on Retirement – September 2023

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Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Steve Jobs

The older I get the more I think about retirement. But some things in this life should take a while to make decisions about and retirement is definitely one of those things. I made my decision on retirement 4 years ago when I decided not to retire. Recently, I made my second decision about retirement when I again decided not to retire. But it’s never too early to start thinking about various aspects of retirement as in what you want to retire to. I want to retire to a quiet life of blogging and writing my Future Best Seller tentatively titled The Man Who Had No Hobbies.

The time had come to upgrade my workstation.

Here’s the workstation for my Day Job.

And here’s my new personal workstation setup (yeah, looks the same).

My old Windows 7 machine was nearing the end. At the bottom left of the picture you can see it still sitting on the floor. I’ve upgraded to a Windows 11 laptop, docking station, and two extra monitors. I should be good until Windows 20 now.

For other random retirement thoughts go to https://garyskitchen.net/. At one point I may combine the two into a single blog.

Maybe when I’m retired.